when necessary, use words

This week saw the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization (yes folks, that’s spelled with a zee) take place in Cape Town.

I held an open posture (a “reverse pretzel”) towards the goings on, and met face to face with a few delegates. But by and large I remained fringer than the self-proclaimed “fringe”. Part of this advanced yogic manipulation involved my posting a question per day on conversation.lausanne.org.

For evangelicals, regardless of the plethora of diverse issues – globalism, truth, social action, climate- the answer is always “Jesus”. Even then, we shall have to ask again, “Which Jesus?”

So here, to summarise, are what I see as key questions to address going forward. Conversation around these on conversation.lausanne was not prolific, so let me simply repost them here:

Can Evangelical – Postevangelical interfaith dialog bear fruit?

How have liberal, postmodern and emergent values infiltrated evangelicalism?

13 thoughts on “Lausanne 2010 – the questions to your answer.”

Nic – Remember that it was Danish Pholosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, who said that, “as soon as we are old enough to look around, we find ourselves on a ship that has already been lauched”. This ship, evangelicalism, has now become a worldview that represents absolute truth. It is called a biblical worldview (we’ve had so much of this word this week!). It still has not occured to our evangelical peers that there is nothing uniquely biblical about this worldview, it just happens to be the current worldview when the Bible was written. We cannot call our current cosmology; Christian, Moslem, Chinese etc.

Our challenge as post-evangelicals is, to find strategies and wisdom to celebrate evangelicals who are living inside a single worldview from beginning to end (birth to death), without breaking or even questioning their worldview. I guess evangelicals who have been on this road for more that thirty years and are still insisting on a biblical worldview, are just ‘hopeless’ cases. Their assumptions are GOSPEL.

The challenge for me is to see ourselves in them. Wayne Dyer says: When we judge other people, we do not define them; rather, we define ourselves as people who need to judge.

Can you clarify – what do you mean “celebrate evangelicals who are living inside a single worldview” – do you mean accept and love, or actively promote? I personally can think of many things to celebarate, but people living in boxes is not one of them!

All dialogue where people are actually willing to listen to and try to understand each other – without immediately judging what they think they heard – can and will bear fruit.

2. How have liberal, postmodern and emergent values infiltrated evangelicalism?

Frankly, I don’t like the wording of the question. “Infiltrated” in my understanding comes from a warfare paradigm. I’d expect that question from a heresy hunter, not from you. If the question is: “How has evangelicalism changed due to postmodern and emergent influences?”, then I’d say there is a greater sensibility to issues other than just conversion, although “social justice” still is seen as secondary to eternal salvation of the soul (see Piper’s contribution at the congress).

3. Is evangelicalism inherently dualistic?
That depends on the definition of “evangelicalism”. If you want to limit it to the thinking in boxes, then “yes”. If we see it as a historical movement in flux and constantly changing (see question 2), then “no, not necessarily”.

4. Is “worship” a separate idea from “evangelization”?
For many evangelicals it is but the same could be said about many non-evangelicals.

5. What comes first – belief, behaviour, or belonging?
Belonging. Even some evangelicals get that, believe it or not! 😉

6. Does the Gospel of Grace require the threat of Hell?
No, love drives out all fear, particularly the fear of punishmnent. Although it would be fair to say that “hell” properly understood is one of the things the gospel delivers us us from.

7. How does our salary affect our theology?
Everything affects our theology. But why ask that particular question here? I was under the impression that plenty of the participants at the congress are not overpaid executives but coming from very modest backgrounds financially. The bulk of evangelicals today is living in Second and Third World countries.

Thanks Josh for taking the time to consider each question. I get the impression these might not have been your questions (you’d be welcome to spell them out), so thanks for extending yoruself into my space a little.

Heres some responses
2. I was being deliberately ambigous when I used the word “infiltrated”, in order to force some thought on what to many ev’s took to be threatening.

4. Yes, the dualism exists in many places, but in mainstream ev’ism salvation is viewed as key and worship is the thing we do with / to them once they are “in”.

6. I like your inversion here – the Gospel delivers us not just from our “hell” but from the “doctrine of hell” too.

7. Sure, there were many voices from less well paid quarters, but even a measly salary from an organisation with a particular worldview will affect our behavior. You are correct that theology is interconnected to all of our life, but there is a particualr expression of this which is not holistically connected, ie is based on other dualisms, and that is what I find dangerous.

Lausanne has been in my fringe experience, a group of people whose livelihood depended on being able to “rescue the lost”, and that means that many other qualities and approaches to spirituality are viewed as more or less irrelevant.

In my view, the dualism itself as a contrast between “in” and “out” is not the problem. It’s the way it is projected onto God. Seeing ourselves or others as “out” is a self-created, false reality but as far as perception is concerned, still a reality. If the Gospel were framed the way it is supposed to be (emphasizing that we’re all “in” and have always been accepted in God’s sight) then the view of what constitutes the being “out” would radically change and locate the problem in ourselves rather than God.

Evangelization would still be just as relevant as it was before but it would focus on helping people “see” what is already true rather than perpetuating the erroneous view that an act of conversion is changing our status before God.

having got out from under a long bout of writing, I am now doing some stimulating visiting and have been reading this piece and the comments.

I thought your readers might like to read this quote from a wonderful opinion piece by David Eagleman in last September’s New Scientist magazine:

” But when we reach the end of the pier of everything we know, we find that it only takes us part of the way. Beyond that all we see is uncharted water. Past the end of the pier lies all the mystery about our deeply strange existence: the equivalence of mass and energy, dark matter, multiple spatial dimensions, how to build consciousness, and the big questions of meaning and existence….good scientists are comfortable holding many possibilities at once, rather than committing to a particular story over others. In light of this, I have found myself surprised by the amount of certainty out there….”

(David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. His book of ‘possibilian’ tales, Sum, became an international best-seller and is published in 22 languages.)

Anyhow thanks for that beautiful quote. The call for me is to respond in awe and love to this our deeply strange existance. There is definately a part of me who is always surprized by the excess of certainty.

I am intruiged that you managed to stay with this conversation. I have such a love/hate relationship with evangelicalism and this ambivalence is my disease, so I can’t really see whats in it for others. What I am asking is what is in this particular conversation for you?

….that I like to dip in and out of religious debate and discourse now and then……as I reflect on humans’ ancient need to set themselves in the context of the supportive rituals of sacred story/myth – Christianity being one of the most potent – and how we reconcile ourselves with the ungraspable vastness and mystery of the Cosmos as it is being revealed by modern science and cosmology. Personally, I see what science has revealed as emphasising the apophatic view of God which personally, I find the most satisfying being a long-time addict of mystery and silence both. But I go to church – Scottish Episcopal to be precise – since I find the ancient rituals of sacred story deeply satisfying.

I have been writing within the context of the following statement of Jung’s:
“I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud.” You can see the end result, now published as a memoir, at http://dazzlingdarkness.wordpress.com/ – ‘Wisps from the Dazzling Darkness’